


Beginning Song

by fuckener



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Sam Wilson/Riley, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:43:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8165554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: Sam is sent to pick up the newly unfrozen Winter Soldier. They're still figuring each other out.





	

Steve is too high on the UN’s list of undesirables to go pretty much anywhere these days, so it’s Sam who travels into Wakanda with the assistance of the new king. 

It puts significant dent in his bucket list, even though he doesn’t get to see any further than the floor-to-ceiling windows of the elaborate facility Bucky’s being kept in. T’Challa greets him there out of respect - Sam likes him for being simple in his motivations like that, for having the kind of honour it takes to actively protect the life of someone you regret wanting dead, even at your own risk.

“Barnes’s vitals have remained stable since he went under,” T’Challa tells him as he leads the way through pristine white corridors, arms folded behind his back. He doesn’t bring his bodyguard with him. Sam likes him for that, too. “We have been preparing him for displacement over the past week.”

Sam frowns, confused. “He’s still frozen?” 

T’Challa briefly glances back at him over his shoulder and then leads them through the next hallway to a pair of huge metal doors. 

There’s a small circular screen on the wall beside them. Red light beams out from the it, projecting a grid onto T’Challa’s face. It turns blank again after a second, and the doors slide open with ease.

Inside, a metal container stands in the middle of the room. It’s circled by four curved desks, their flat-screen surfaces recording vitals. Sam works his way around the room trying to figure them all out, but they’re more elaborate than anything he’s ever seen before; everything but the zig-zagging green lines monitoring Bucky’s heartbeat.

T’Challa touches one of the screens deftly. The walls of the container recede into the floor - and leave behind Bucky, frozen in a glass case like some eerie artefact in preservation. Asleep looking.

“I thought it would be best if he was met by a familiar face,” T’Challa says.

His hand hovers over another monitor. Sam can feel his eyes on him, expectant and intent, but can't look away.

Bucky is stood completely, inhumanly still inside the container, upright with his eyes shut, his back straight. He doesn’t look real - instead he looks more like a scientific exhibit, a bad wax replica that might have existed in Captain America’s boarded up museum once. 

He doesn’t look alive.

Sam looks away. It should be Steve doing this, he thinks.

He nods his head. T’Challa presses his hand to the screen.

The inside of the container immediately begins to thaw. A computerised voice monitors the temperature aloud as it steadily rises and rises.

Sam sees it happen before the computer tells him - the colour seeping back into Bucky’s skin.

“ _Thirty-seven degrees Celsius_ ,” the voice says, and then Bucky’s eyes flash open and dark.

The container opens wide. Bucky stumbles out with a sharp gasp, and Sam catches him before he hits the floor.

-

Wakandan hospitality is something else. They have a one-table feast laid out in the adjoining room that T’Challa leads them to after Bucky gets back on his feet. 

He leaves after bringing them there. Defrosting the Winter Soldier is probably low on his list of duties for the day, and he probably isn’t interested in hanging out with the two fugitive superheros he’s harbouring for much longer than necessary. Fair enough.

“How long,” Bucky asks between mouthfuls.

Sam taps his fork against his empty plate. He still feels unsettled from earlier, although he isn’t exactly sure why. He’s seen far worse than Barnes standing in that tube before. You don’t go into war with a weak stomach - and if you do, you damn sure don’t come back out with one.

His eyes catch on the dark circles around Bucky’s eyes. Seeing him now, full-on and awake like this, he looks as worn out as ever, like the most merciful thing to do with him would be to stick him back in that freezer and let him sleep it off for another decade or two. 

Sam rounds it up for him. “Ten months.”

Bucky stops chewing for a moment, his expression unreadable, and then he swallows and nods.

Ten _months_ , Sam thinks, and although he knows that amount of time means something different to him than it does to his genetically engineered - _friend_ , he still wonders if Bucky is frightened by it nonetheless.

“I thought it might’ve been longer,” he mumbles, staring down at his food.

“Why?” Sam piles some jollof onto his plate, figuring it’s in his best interest to make himself eat. “I look old now?”

“I thought it would take longer, I mean.”

He meets Sam’s eyes for the first time since he left the container. 

Already he looks so resigned to what’s going to happen next. Already, Sam can tell from the look in his eyes that Bucky doesn’t believe whatever they’re about to do next will actually work.

Sam snorts. “Here I thought some time off might lighten you up.”

The corners of Bucky’s mouth tilt up just slightly.

“Hey, don’t hurt yourself now.”

They eat in comfortable enough silence. Bucky must have been starving considering what he’s packing away, but his hands are awkward around the utensils and the way he eats is measured, restrained somehow. Careful not to show teeth. 

“Steve,” he says after a moment. 

“He’s how you’d expect him to be.” Sam shrugs. “Happy about this. You, I mean.”

Bucky says nothing. He presses his lips together.

Really, Steve isn’t in a much better place than he was ten months ago when the shit was hitting the fan in a spectacularly bad way - but Steve is Steve, and he makes do as always. Despite everything on the news he still manages to make criminal activity feel like the most noble thing Sam’s ever been a part of.

“What about Stark - Iron Man.” Bucky frowns in concentration. “ _Tony_. Tony.” His looks down at his hands. “What about him?”

Well, Sam - he isn’t sure how Tony’s doing these days. Communication between them is sparse and not half as verbose as it used to be when they were all on the same team - when Tony would would end groupwide messages with at least two and a half rambling paragraphs debating the best options for where to grab dinner next time they were all at the compound, followed by a quick _P.S. Whoever it is that somehow got my third favourite white Armani shirt washed among their luridly coloured delicates, I am billing you for the full cost of said article of clothing as well as for the emotional damages you have caused myself and my loved ones, which, all in all, comes out to an estimated total of $3,000,000,000.000. Have your people call my Pepper. _

Now it’s just _They know your location. Rhodey’s doing better. Stay down south for a while._ After the last UN summit meeting he sent a message just saying, _What a fucking mess._

He’s never asked about Bucky. Sam doesn’t blame him for it. He’s right - it _is_ a fucking mess.

“From what I know he’s alright.” Last he heard, Nat said Pepper had moved back into the house, at least. “He’ll be okay.”

Bucky lowers his head, halfway to a nod. 

“Okay,” he repeats.

He doesn't eat anything else after that. He just sits and stares and says nothing.

Back when Bucky had just come around again, when Steve didn’t know how to reassure him that he was still a good person, Sam told him that sometimes there was nothing you could say to make somebody feel better. It was an important thing he learned after the army, after Riley, after counselling classes: sometimes it was enough just to be there.

Sam sure as hell doesn’t feel like enough right now.

“Let’s go,” he decides.

Bucky looks over at him.

Sam wipes his mouth on a linen napkin and pushes his chair out from the table. “Come on, man. We’ve got places to be.”

-

A woman leads them back the way Sam came. The people in the facility keep working as they make their exit, talking quietly to one another and gesturing to the screens in their hands, barely noticing them walk by. 

One man glances up. His eyes catch on Bucky and he startles, eyes widening, before he looks down again sharply.

Bucky tenses. Sam sees it; he feels it. That’s why hanging out with the guy is so tough - his feelings are always so intense, and Sam has a habit of absorbing that kind of thing like secondhand smoke. 

It was a good skill for being a counsellor. Not so good for being friends with a group of emotionally damaged super people. 

The woman leads them outside, up to the helicopter pad where the aircraft Sam came in is waiting. Bucky climbs inside without saying a word.

She nods at Sam, smiling. “The king sends his regards.”

“Tell him thanks for the hospitality.” He has to yell the next part over the sound of the rotors starting to turn. “Hopefully we won’t be seeing each other anytime soon.”

-

Sam explains the plan when they’re both onboard. Bucky doesn’t ask any questions when he’s done, just nods, stone-faced, and swivels around in the pilot seat with his back to Sam.

He flies them in silence. It’s pointless - the thing has GPS, autopilot and their objective coordinates already entered - but Sam figures climbing the first 10,000 miles might let him take his mind off of things, so he lets him have it for a while.

A while turns into an hour, and it becomes palpably clear that flying is doing nothing to calm Bucky down. Sam isn’t really comfortable sitting in the passenger seat with someone driving angry or - whatever this is, he isn’t sure.

“Hey.” He puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

It’s meant to be comforting; Bucky goes rigid at his touch, his hands white-knuckled on the stick.

Sam quickly takes his hand away again.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He swallows. After a second, his grip turns relaxes again. “It’s not you, it’s just...”

“I know. It’s okay.”

Sam goes into the back to sit at the table and give Bucky some space.

This thing was built using blueprints from the leaked S.H.I.E.L.D. documents. Looks kind of like the carrier he and Steve and sometimes Nat would use for missions. It’s - it’s a little weird after everything that’s happened now.

After a few long, strange moments, Bucky appears. He sits across from Sam at the table, his mouth a thin line.

“What if it doesn’t work,” he asks eventually. “What happens then?”

He gives Sam a level look, and Sam wishes he could say with conviction, _it will_ \- wishes that if he told Bucky _you’d still have a place anyway_ he’d be able to believe it.

But Sam doesn’t know what this is like for him, because of nobody does: Bucky’s life is too specifically tragic, his trauma more complicated than Sam dealt with at any group meeting. He isn’t sure what he should be saying, if anything.

He doesn’t know what Bucky is going through, but he does know how it feels after years of suffering - of watching suffering, inflicting suffering, enduring suffering - to have to to walk back into your life without knowing how to belong in it anymore. 

It was suffocating to be so lonely, he remembers. A different kind of loneliness than Bucky, maybe, but still. He'd imagined coming home with Riley for so long that sleeping in an empty bed hurt like hell every night - he spent the first year back in DC sleeping on the living room floor and still hurting when he woke up the next morning in an empty, empty house.

He does his best to swallow the thickness from his throat, and says, “We keep going.” 

A moment passes. At his sides Bucky’s hands fitfully clench and unclench.

“What if nothing works?” he asks, quietly. 

His voice is flat, like this is the eventuality he’s already accepted happening. Sam’s always found it an infuriating thing, hearing good people talk about themselves like they’re worth less than they are.

“If nothing ever, ever wipes those codes from your brain,” Sam starts, “if you always have that capacity to lose control, we learn how to avoid the opportunity for it to happen as much as possible. We’ll get through.”

Bucky’s brow furrows like he has no idea what Sam means.

He shakes his head, frowning. There's more feeling in his voice than Sam’s ever heard before when he says, sharply, “I’m not putting anyone else in that kind of danger again.”

“I know,” Sam agrees. “That’s why we’re doing this.”

Bucky bangs his fists on the table between them, hard enough to rattle the floor under their feet.

His head is bent, eyes dark - more like the man Sam fought a year ago than the one that collapsed into his arms in Wakanda this afternoon.

“ _No_.” Bucky’s mouth twists to the side. “No, you shouldn’t - if I stay like this, you put me down or you go. There's no _‘we’_ when this goes wrong.” 

He shakes his head and doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes.

“I’m not coming out of the freeze ten months from now just to remember what killing you was like, too,” he says, lowly.

It takes a moment for Sam to know how to respond to that, to do anything but look at him wide-eyed. 

He shakes his head slowly. “Hey,” he says, softly. “That won't happen.”

“You don’t know.” Bucky pulls his hands back from the table: the metal one has left a dent the size of Sam’s head in the surface. “It could.”

_Bucky can still be dangerous_ , Steve warned him before he left, and he looked at Sam in that meaningful way of his that let him know if Sam wanted to step back from this it wouldn't be held against him, not a bit, not ever.

By then Bucky had been frozen for nine months, thirteen days and counting, and going to Wakanda to get him the hell out of dodge was the only option in Sam’s mind. 

There might be a real chance he can help Bucky get better. This much has been clear to Sam since the beginning: when the world presents an opportunity to save a life, it doesn’t do so lightly. 

“You shouldn’t have come for me,” Bucky mutters after a moment, his jaw working. “You shouldn’t have agreed to this.”

For the life of him, Sam can’t figure out what Bucky needs to hear, what answer might actually be good enough to shut him up, if one even exists. Maybe it does, in someone else, but Sam - he just has to work with what he’s got here.

He shakes his head. “I’m not afraid of you, Bucky.”

Bucky’s eyes flick up to meet his then, sharp and startlingly intense. 

“That's what I'm worried about,” he says.

They sit for a second, locking eyes with that between them, and then Sam shakes his head, huffs out a laugh. He gets it, now.

“How about this, then.” He stands up, goes towards the first-aid cupboard he keeps the card-deck in and brings it back over to the table. “Nobody in the world knows where we are right now. That’s pretty safe, right? So while we’re up here let’s have a rule: _minimal_ worrying.” He takes the cards out the pack and starts shuffling. “I’d ban it flat-out, but I don’t want to have to throw you out the window of this thing.”

Bucky’s mouth curls just slightly.

Sam smiles at him. He reaches over the table to offer the deck out. “Your deal, okay?”

They’re hands touch over the cards. Bucky doesn’t flinch.

“Yeah.” His mouth curls into something like a smile. “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> this fic now has a sort-of sequel, as the days ahead become behind


End file.
